I'm thinking companies are now paying for Red Hat license and support on Azure VMs and Microsoft wants that money.

It's an easy thing for Microsoft sales guy to offer to your bosses' bosses' boss next time they're golfing and having expensive dinner together, "hey you can get your Linux also from us, it will save you money by consolidating vendors and whatnot".

I expect many companies will switch to this no matter how much worse it might be than what they had previously.

Valve has to translate Windows and DirectX to have any meaningful games on the SteamDeck.

Only HNers to think Microsoft is desperate.

They have had a linux distro for a while, this one is at least 6 years old. They used it for container workloads, including those visible to client like AKS.

It seems with 4 they are using Fedora underneath.